Gosh, I can’t remember. Was part of Mr. Jefferson’s founding vision for UVa to create an unaffordably elitist institution?
The University of Virginia Board of Visitors voted Thursday to hike tuition for in-state undergraduates by 3.8% and out-of-staters by 4.8% next school year. The vote marked a victory for President Teresa Sullivan and others whose vision is to achieve academic excellence by spending heavily on faculty recruitment, information technology and R&D facilities, and extracting wealth from university students in order to pay for it.
The vote occurred the same day Governor Bob McDonnell released a letter to state university administrators and board asking them to limit tuition hikes to the Consumer Price Index.
Several board members worried that failure to jack up tuition might put the school in financial jeopardy, reported the Washington Post. “From a business perspective, you are not giving yourself a lot of room to wiggle,” said John L. Nau III, a Texas beer distributor. “It seems to me that we are living right on a razor’s edge.” Nau made no effort to reconcile that statement with the fact that UVa’s endowment increased 28.4% in 2011-2012, bringing it to $4.8 billion, the best performance of the 32 largest university endowments in the country, according to Forbes Magazine.
The Post article mentioned only two board members by name who opposed the tuition hikes: Dr. Edward D. Miller and Rector Helen Dragas. Dragas, who runs a Virginia Beach real estate development company founded by her father, has been viciously assailed for being an out-of-touch elitist for her role in the controversy surrounding Sullivan’s resignation and reinstatement last year. In this instance, the out-of-touch elitist was one of the few willing to go to the mats to protect the interests of middle-class Virginians.
“We cannot stay on an unsustainable tuition increase path,” Dragas told the board in explaining her vote. “A lot of institutions across the country, a lot of states, are holding the line on tuition this year.” UVa administrators, she argued, have long used decreased state funding as a “scapegoat” for ever-increasing spending.
Amplifying the air of unreality surrounding the debate, a few dozen activists gathered in the Rotunda to demand better pay for low-level staff members, pushing for the so-called living wage. No one protested the decision to jack up students’ tuition, room and board at nearly double the inflation rate.
— JAB
